Fault Lines
by tigerdreams
Summary: Set after "One Time at Space Camp." To distract herself from her increasingly complicated feelings regarding Zane, Jo agrees to try a new security device that connects her to the GD building, but when something goes wrong, everyone feels the earth move.
1. Chapter 1

"Whenever you're ready, Ms. Lupo."

"Just get it over with already, Larry," Jo ground out through gritted teeth, "I have a lot of work waiting for me today."

"All right," he agreed, and she could _hear_ the smarmy, sycophantic grin on his face, even with her back to him. "You'll just feel a slight prick..."

A series of needle-sharp points pierced the back of her neck, and she stifled a gasp of pain. She could hear servos whirring softly as the device settled itself against her skin, and then – the pain was gone. It didn't ease up or taper off, the way pain usually did when the cause of the pain was removed; rather, the sensation simply vanished. Her hand started to creep up to investigate the device, but she aborted the gesture.

"Don't worry, Ms. Lupo, the CHARMS interface is quite durable, now that it's in place. You should be able to go through your usual range of physical activity without risk of dislodging it."

"I don't have to worry about pulling my spine out if the thing gets knocked loose, do I?" That would probably have been a better question to ask _before_ having the thing clamped to her neck, she realized, but she'd had other things on her mind that morning. _Things I'd rather not think about right now,_ she reminded herself, and stepping away from the installation chair, she turned to face the annoying young scientist.

"No, not at all," Larry assured her in a tone that managed to sound both brown-nosing and condescending at the same time. "The CHARMS module isn't physically attached to your spinal cord at all; the interface is entirely electromagnetic. Focused electrical signals are conducted through the surrounding tissue to stimulate the relevant neurons in your spine, which sends those signals to the various peripheral systems throughout your body to generate the relevant sensory–"

She fixed him with a glare. "Cut to the chase, Larry."

"Right, sorry. Anyway, the upshot is, any anomaly that GD's internal security sensors detect will be echoed in your own physical senses. For example, you'll feel changes to the ventilation system in your lungs, shorts in the electrical systems in your peripheral nerves, and – well, let's just hope the building doesn't have come down with sewage problems, right?" He thought he was being funny. Jo hated when Larry thought he was being funny. The look on her face must have told him that she was not amused, because he cleared his throat and continued. "Any of GD's systems that don't have an obvious corollary in human physiology, you'll sense with a sort of phantom-limb feeling. You should be able to recognize and identify the cause of the sensation immediately, even though it won't correspond with any particular part of your body."

Jo nodded. "Excellent. Anything else I need to know?"

There was that irritating smile again. "There shouldn't be any problems with the CHARMS interface, but if anything unforeseen does occur, bring it back here for maintenance. Don't try to remove it manually."

"Because it could damage the device?" Jo guessed.

He glanced down at the floor. "Because it could cause significant neural damage to your spine," he admitted. As Jo started toward him, he brought his hands up in a defensive gesture. "But there shouldn't be any problems that would necessitate removal! It's been extensively tested. The Secret Service has already ordered half a dozen units. There shouldn't be any problems at all."

She stopped halfway across the room from him, and rubbed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. "All right. Fine. I'll be back here if there are any problems." She turned and stalked across the brightly-lit lab toward the door, her heels clicking on the clean linoleum floor. Larry was as much of an annoyance as ever, but Jo found that today, she didn't really mind being annoyed. Annoyance kept her mind busy, and the last thing she wanted was enough mental space for her thoughts to drift to...

Zane. He'd been waiting for her beside the door to Larry's lab, and as soon as he crossed the threshold, he pushed himself off from the wall he'd been leaning against and approached her. "Jo, we need to talk."

Her stomach clenched in a way that she knew had nothing to do with the interface hiding under her ponytail, and she sped up her pace. "What's there to talk about? I told you last night why I withdrew my name from the Astraeus mission."

He caught her arm and pulled her up short. "You gave me _a_ reason, but I'm not sure it's _the_ reason. I think there's more going on here, and it has to do with us."

_Damn it, damn it, damn it!_ When had he gotten so good at reading her? He was reminding her more and more of Zane from the other time-line. Her stomach twisted. "Not everything has to be about you, Zane." She tried to ignore the hurt that flashed across his eyes following that remark.

"What's going on with you, Jo-Jo? The moment I start thinking I know where I stand with you, you pull back on me."

She snorted. "You're one to talk about mixed signals. One moment you're talking about leaving Eureka, and the next you're getting pouty that I'm not going to spend six months on another planet with you. Maybe you still find this whole 'us' business to be hilarious, but I –" She cut herself off, pressing a hand to her chest. Something felt strange when she took a breath. "There's a problem in the ventilation systems." Her gaze wandered, and her voice took on a distracted tone as she focused on the sensation in her lungs. "Section Two. I've got to go check it out."

She took off down the corridor in the direction of the elevators, silently thanking Larry for his Comprehensive Holistic Awareness whatever-it-was device; dealing with GD's problems gave her something to plunge all of her attention into. Maybe once she was finished dealing with the ventilation issue, Zane would have dropped the serious-and-sensitive act and gone back to his usual rebellious horndog self, and she could go back to pretending she didn't desperately wish for things to be different between them.

Zane stood staring after her for a few moments, as scientists and assistants wandered past him on their way to file reports or perform experiments. "Hilarious?" he asked himself aloud, prompting a puzzled look from a passing chemical engineer. _Is that what she thinks? That this is all some big joke to me? Is that why she keeps pulling away whenever it starts to look like we're finally getting somewhere? Shit..._ He turned and stormed down the corridor in the opposite direction that Jo had taken, scattering a trio of plant geneticists in his wake. The accusation made him more than a little uncomfortable, because there was a seed of truth to it. _Sure, at first. When I noticed her acting differently toward me, and started picking up on the sexual tension, yeah, I liked the idea that I could get under her skin that way. Watching her get all flustered and worked up around me was kind of a laugh._ He shook his head. _But seeing her with that ring was kind of a bucket of cold water in the face. I never thought I'd give anybody that ring – never thought I'd want to._ His hands clenched into tense fists at his sides. _I can see in her eyes how different she thinks I am from the "other Zane," but he was still me. Same life, same experiences before he came to Eureka, everything. And if someone could be that important to him, to make him think about getting married... _He remembered the expression of pure delight on Jo's face when he first mentioned the idea of helping her study for the Astraeus exams. _Like she'd never realized how much she wanted it until someone told her it was possible._ He felt his chest constrict with the frustrated, desperate _need_ to make her understand. _There's got to be a way..._


	2. Chapter 2

_(Slightly Belated) Disclaimer: I don't own Eureka, the characters, or any related intellectual property, and am making no money from this story._

_Author's Note: Thank you, everyone who has reviewed thus far! It's really gratifying to know that there are people reading along and enjoying this story. I hope this chapter doesn't disappoint._

Jo was halfway to the elevator when the doors slid open to reveal Carter, probably coming up from Allison's medical lab. When he saw her hustling toward the elevator, he stopped in mid-step and held the door open for her. "Problem?" he asked when she closed to conversational distance.

"I think so," she confirmed, feeling a flush of relief at having work to concentrate on. "I'm not sure exactly, but there's something wrong with the vents in one of the labs in Section Two."

"Can I give you a hand?" Carter asked. "It looks like a slow day so far, in town. Some kid electromagnetically charged his sister's braces, and we had to pry her off the bike rack at Tesla, but she's fine now."

Jo waved a hand at him. "Sure. Just be quiet for a second; I'm trying to pinpoint the source of the problem." She closed her eyes and took a few slow breaths, focusing on the sensations in her lungs.

Carter blinked. "Pinpoint the... what's going on, Jo?"

"Oh, right." She opened her eyes again, then turned slightly away from him and held her ponytail to one side to reveal the device attached to the back of her neck. "New GD hardware. Comprehensive Holistic Awareness Relay and... Monitoring System, I think. It links my senses to GD's internal monitoring devices, so I'm instantly alerted to any security issue and can track it down using sensory cues."

Carter took a half-step back. "Um, this isn't going to be like the PALs all over again, is it? 'Cause I can think of about a dozen ways that thing could go horribly wrong."

Jo dropped her ponytail and shook her head. "There shouldn't be any problems like we had with the PALs; those were experimental predictive technology that relied on a supercomputer to manage the calculations. This is just a real-time data feed, and they've had plenty of time to work all the bugs out. Larry said that they're already accepting orders from the government on this."

"Oh, Larry said? Well, color me reassured," Carter drawled. He shook his head. "I just don't trust anything that hooks itself up to your brain."

Jo started to reply, but was interrupted by a coughing spasm. She cleared her throat a couple of times and swallowed. "Foreign objects in the ventilation shafts," she told Carter. "Somewhere in the east wing." The elevator doors _whooshed_ silently open onto Section Two. "Let's go track it down." Carter nodded and followed her out.

It took them less than ten minutes to zero in on the lab where the problem had originated, with the CHARMS interface playing hotter-or-colder with Jo's respiratory tract. After the sixth lab they checked, Jo had to stop and lean against the wall through another coughing fit, this one punctuated by a violent sneeze at the end. Afterward, all she'd said was, "This way!" and led Carter down a side corridor at a jog.

He caught up with her when she stopped in front of the door to a lab. "It's this one." Carter noticed that her voice was a little rough, as if she'd recently had a hay fever attack. He started to ask if she was okay, but she preempted him by opening the door.

"Don't open that!" shouted a man from inside the room. Too late, of course; Jo was already across the threshold, with Carter close at her heels.

"What? Why?" Carter asked, looking around in alarm. Throughout the lab, white-coated figures were crawling around the floor on all fours, peering under counters and cabinets. Rows of small wire cages lined one wall of the lab, and he noticed that several of them stood empty, with their doors hanging loosely open.

The man who had spoken shoved past the two enforcement officers and pushed the door closed behind them, making sure the latch clicked home securely before turning to face them. "We've had an escape, and we don't want the specimens getting out of the lab. So please, keep the door shut until we find them." The short, bearded man slid his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose, and finally seemed to remember who he was talking to. "Security Chief Lupo, Sheriff Carter. Is there something you need?"

"They're in the air vents," Jo told him, half of her attention already on the walls of the room as she looked for the access points where the escapees could have gotten into the ventilation system.

"Okay, I'll ask the obvious question," Carter announced. "_What_ are in the air vents?"

The bearded lead scientist was about to respond when Fargo's voice, slightly tinny from the speakers that were projecting it, cut in. "Only GD's longest-running longitudinal study of nutritional efficacy of foods designed for long-term space missions!" His voice rose to a slightly squeaky pitch toward the end of the sentence. "We only have a matter of weeks before Astraeus launches, and your test subjects get loose before you can tell us whether the nutrition packs Parrish's team has been working on are going to keep us from getting scurvy! This is great, just great! I'm coming down there." On the monitor attached to the speakers, Carter saw Fargo start to push himself up out of his desk chair.

"It's all right, Fargo," Carter told him, raising a hand at the screen in a placating gesture. "We've got everything under control down here. Jo's already checking the air vents to track down where the – what are they again?" he asked the bearded scientist beside him.

"Guinea pigs," the short man supplied, "they're a good experimental match for certain nutritional requirements in humans, because they can't naturally synthesize their own vitamin C, the way most mammals can."

"Guinea pigs," Carter repeated, mostly to himself. "Of course. Can't have crazy super-science without Guinea pigs. Don't worry, Fargo," he said to the monitor, "we'll find your Guinea pigs."

On the screen, he saw the young Director lower himself back into his chair. "Well, all right," he said, not entirely mollified, "but keep me apprised. The last thing I need with all the final preparations for the Astraeus launch to worry about is a bunch of experimental subjects going all _Secret of NIMH_ on us. Are you sure you and Jo have things under control down there?"

Carter glanced over his shoulder at Jo, who had dragged a table against the far wall underneath an air vent and was now perched on top of it, her high-heeled shoes discarded on the floor below. He turned back to the monitor. "Yeah, everything's well in hand here. Leave it to us, and we'll have the little guys back in their cages in no time." Fargo nodded and turned off the video call, and Carter looked at the scientist beside him, who was watching Jo anxiously. "They _are_ still 'little' guys, right? You guys haven't come up with mutant ninja Guinea pigs, or anything?"

The other man shook his head. "No, they're perfectly normal examples of the species, physiologically. There has been some selective breeding for intelligence throughout the course of the study, simply because of some of the behaviors we require of them, but they're certainly not dangerous."

"Well that's good, because I think they're about to meet someone who _is_." Carter's gaze drifted over the scientist's head to fix on Jo, who had the hatch of the vent lifted up and was visually measuring the width of the duct against her shoulder span.

"Carter, can you give me a hand over here?" she called. "I need a boost."

The sheriff quickly crossed the room, with the diminutive biologist trailing after him. "You're gonna need something to catch them in, if you're heading in after them," Carter observed. He turned to the scientist in charge of the project, whose name, Carter realized, he still hadn't asked. "I don't suppose you've got, I don't know, a pillowcase or something?"

The scientist rummaged in a nearby drawer for a moment and came up with a heavy cloth bag with a drawstring mouth. "Try not to put more than two or three in before you bring them back out," he instructed Jo. "They can get rather territorial."

Jo stuck her head into the vent, sniffed experimentally, and winced. "Yeah, I can smell that. Get me a spare lab coat." As the bearded man gestured at a lab tech to fetch the coat, Jo twisted her ponytail up into a tight bun against the back of her head.

"Are you sure you want to go in there?" Carter asked, eyeing the duct aperture dubiously.

"Well you're not going to fit," she retorted, reaching for the bag. When the tech returned with the lab coat, she shrugged it on and buttoned it closed. "Now, help me up."

Carter climbed up and knelt on the metal table, making a stirrup with his hands. Jo stepped into it with her sock-clad foot and, with a lift from Carter, wriggled into the shaft opening. The sheriff slid down off the table and stood next to the bearded scientist to wait.

"I'm sorry I didn't introduce myself earlier, Sheriff, but with the stress of the escape and having to report it to Director Fargo, I... well, you know how things can get around here. I'm Dr. Bernard, head of the zero-G zoology lab."

Carter accepted the shorter man's extended hand and shook it. "That's not a problem, Dr. Bernard. Let's just focus on getting everything back under control and – I'm sorry, did you just say 'zero-G zoology'?"

Bernard nodded. "Weightlessness can have a significant impact on the way an organism absorbs and processes nutrients. In order to determine conclusively whether the Astraeus team or any other group of astronauts will be able to meet their nutritional needs with the foods we're testing, we need to expose the test subjects to zero- and low-gravity conditions on a regular basis."

"So these Guinea pigs could have just _floated_ up into the air vent?" Carter asked, gesturing with one hand to imitate a levitating rodent.

Bernard scratched his beard. "I don't know – maybe. The Localized Repulsor Field was left on overnight, and there isn't any other likely way for them to have reached that vent; Guinea pigs are poor climbers. But I still don't know how they could have escaped their cages to begin with. Our standard laboratory protocols mandate that two people personally check each cage before closing up the lab for the night, and last night I was one of them. Matthew, one of our techs, was the other, and he's one of the most reliable people here."

Carter strolled over to the cages and started poking at one of the open doors. "You said there was no gravity in here last night?"

"Well, that's not quite how the technology works; the force of gravity was effectively neutralized by an equivalent force being projected in the opposite direction," Bernard corrected.

Carter raised a hand to fend off the science-speak. "But everything in this room was basically weightless, right?"

The biologist nodded. "Basically, yes."

Turning his attention back to the cage, Carter fiddled with the latch – a basic lift-slide-and-drop mechanism made of wire. "Then I think I know how the little guys got out. You're gonna need to upgrade your cages if you plan to keep turning off the gravity in here."

Jo's slightly strained voice cut across the lab. "Here's the first three!" She had slid partway out of the air shaft, and was pushing the wriggling canvas bag past her knees for someone to grab. Bernard rushed over to accept his escaped specimens from her, and Carter followed more sedately.

"Flying Guinea pigs. What next?" he muttered. "At least it wasn't a _bank_ this time..."

It didn't take long for Jo to round up the rest of the wayward rodents. She handed down the last squirming bag and snaked out of the duct, landing on the slippery table without apparent difficulty. As she hopped down to the floor and started putting on her shoes, though, Carter noticed her massaging her left hand, as though it were asleep.

"Did one of our little fugitives bite you?" he asked, gesturing at her hand.

She looked down at her hands in mild surprise, then back up at Carter. "Oh, no – but I think they were chewing on some wiring running into one of the other labs in this section; I'll send Maintenance down to check it out when I get back to my office to file a report."

"You still think it's a good idea for GD's systems to be hooked up to your body like this?"

Jo ignored the concern in his voice, and led the way out of the lab and back to the elevator. "Sure. It would've taken them hours to track down those oversized rats if I hadn't been able to trace the ventilation disturbance to this lab. By the time they got around to reporting the escape to Security, the little bastards could've made their way through the air ducts to almost any other lab in this section, interfered with other projects, and caused who-knows-how-much trouble. And it's not actually doing my body any damage; I just get the sensations connected with different things that go wrong. It's like how pain alerts you to something wrong in your body, only now I get those alerts when there's something wrong in GD."

Carter looked unconvinced, but he knew better than to push Jo on something security-related. "Well, if you're sure," was all he said. "I should probably get back to the office. Call me if anything else comes up that I can help with."

"Will do," she assured him as the elevator doors hissed open. "See you later." They parted ways, and Jo paced down the corridor leading back to the Security office. About twenty feet down the hall, she stopped short, and a puzzled look crossed her face. _Strange,_ she thought, _I have the oddest feeling like I've misplaced something, but I can't think what it is._ She patted her pockets, running through a mental checklist: _smartphone, keys, security badge. I don't think I'm missing anything. Weird._ She shrugged off the feeling and continued down the hallway, threading a path through the busy scientists and techs all going distractedly about their own business.


	3. Chapter 3

_Author's Note: Thank you, everyone who has reviewed so far! It really does help keep me motivated, knowing that people are enjoying the story. I hope you all enjoy the latest chapter!_

Jo quickened her pace as she approached the door to the Security office; the stark white-and-steel décor of the room wasn't what most people would consider warm or inviting, but it held a certain appeal to her, especially in her current frame of mind. It was a clear, tidy, orderly space, a room where work was done, a room where the world was simple. There, she divided the universe into Right and Wrong, Safety and Threat, and dealt with it accordingly. Discomfort and uncertainty didn't belong in her office – they just didn't fit, and it was as though the space itself chased them away and eased her in the correct frame of mind to do her job. She understood why her other self in this time-line had designed the office this way: it reflected a part of her psyche, the determined, dedicated, and decisive elements of her personality that drove her that extra mile to do the job and get the bad guy – the part of her that a certain someone had termed "the Enforcer." Having a space all her own that resonated with that part of herself helped to center her, to focus her on the tasks at hand. The one thing that had always bothered her when she was Carter's deputy was not having that private space of her own to focus her thoughts and steel herself for her work.

She touched the scanner to unlock her office door and stepped inside to find Zane waiting for her. He stood beside her desk, fiddling with a glass paperweight. The focus and calm that she'd planned to gather here fled the instant she met his eyes. It wasn't just the wrongness of his invading her private space when she was less than ready to deal with him; even the way he was going about it was wrong. In this time-line, Zane should've been sprawled in her chair, with his feet up on her desk. Except that wasn't fair, either. Maybe he would've done that when she'd first returned from 1947, but their relationship had changed since then. _He_ had changed since then. If he were still the person he'd been when Jo was first thrown into this reality, he would never have had such an anxious expression on his face.

Zane seemed to take her startled silence as a good sign, and spoke before she could regain her senses and tell him to get out. He set the paperweight back on the desk and took a step toward her. "I'm sorry for letting myself in," he gestured at the door, "but I wasn't sure I'd be able to get you alone otherwise. There's something I need to talk to you about."

She shook her head, raising her hands to ward off his words. "I already told you: I dropped out of the Astraeus mission because it was right for _me_. I was doing it for the wrong reasons, and it wasn't something I felt right about–"

Zane closed the distance between them and captured one of her hands. "That's not what I'm here to talk about, Jo-Jo." He still wore the unusually solemn, intense expression that she remembered from their encounter earlier – an expression that held her much more firmly than his gentle grip on her hand. "I get that you're not coming to Titan. I don't like it, but it's your call to make. This is more important; there's something I need you to understand." He bent his head town toward hers, just brushing her lips with his.

In that moment, her body took over, the way it always did when they touched. Words, smiles, meaningful looks, were all the province of her mind, and her mind could build up defenses against them when she didn't want to let Zane in. But touch was the realm of the body, and her body had no defenses when it came to Zane, and wanted none. That was why she kept having "one last time" with him, over and over again, despite all her intentions. It was as though her body didn't realize that this wasn't the man who had proposed to her, who had fallen in love with her. Her lips parted, and she broke his grip on her hand and slid her arms around his neck, pulling him close against her. Her tongue met his, and she savored the taste of him, the familiarity, the _rightness_. She inhaled the subtle, masculine scent of him, and almost forgot all her resolutions about this man, and all the anguish she had endured over the past few months because of him. _Almost_.

She broke away from him, staggering backward a pace. "We can't keep doing this. _I_ can't keep doing this." She wiped her mouth, trying to compose herself.

"You're right. I shouldn't have broken into your office; I'm sorry. Why don't we go down to the cafeteria and get some lunch? We can talk there."

She turned away from him, walking around him to her desk. "No, Zane. I don't want any lunch. I have a report to finish, and then I have to supervise the transfer of a Section Four project in less than an hour." _And if you don't leave me alone long enough for my stomach to get un-twisted, I may not eat anything for the rest of the day_, she added silently.

When she raised her eyes to his stricken expression, her stomach gave another wrench. "Please, Jo, just give me two minutes. This is important."

Jo glanced pointedly at the door. "You've already admitted you shouldn't have come in here. Now I've got work to do."

The tension in his shoulders and arms stood at odds with the defeated look on his face, and made her own muscles ache in sympathy. "I'll talk to you later, then," he promised, and walked out of the office.

She watched the door close, and then turned her attention to her desktop monitor. As she brought up the form appropriate to this morning's incident, her left hand crept up to massage the back of her neck near the CHARMS interface, which felt uncomfortably warm. _I'll have Larry take a look at it later this afternoon, once I deal with the Section Four transport,_ she decided. Just as she set her fingers to the keyboard to begin her report, her smartphone started beeping.

With a sigh, Jo pulled the tiny device from her pocket and answered it. "Lupo."

"Jo, it's Fargo. Can you come down to the cafeteria? I just came in for a cup of coffee, to see all of the automated food dispensers lock themselves down. The natives are starting to get restless."

"What do you need me down there for, Fargo? Can't you just call Maintenance?"

Fargo's voice pitched into a frantic whisper. "Jo, I've got thirty hungry, under-caffeinated geniuses down here wanting to know why they can't have the slice of Vincent's lemon chiffon pie that they've been looking forward to all morning, and the lunch rush is just starting. I need someone in here to keep order until Vincent can make it over here from Cafe Diem to look at his machines." He exhaled sharply in frustration. "He told me when he installed these dispensers that it would _improve_ productivity, to have fresh gourmet food available by automated dispenser twenty-four hours a day. He didn't say anything about the armed insurrection they would cause when they stopped working!"

Jo was already on her feet. "Relax, Fargo. I'll be right there. Just – I don't know – pass out coffee creamer and ketchup packets until I get there."

"All that is automated too!" Fargo squeaked. "'A smart-seasoning system calibrated to the individual palate, for the perfect gastronomical experience.' Vincent's going to get me killed! Do you remember when these people went all _Night of the Living Dead_ on me? Because I do!"

Jo suppressed an exasperated sigh. "They were under the influence of the RSS ray then. It's not going to happen again over a piece of pie." She could hear Fargo's anxious, quickened breathing over the phone as she headed for the door. "I'll be there in a minute." She ended the call and slid the phone back into her pocket. As she hurried down the corridor, her hand crept up to scratch absently at the back of her neck.


	4. Chapter 4

_Author's Note: I'm sorry it took so long to get this chapter up; I had a project to finish on the 17th and was sort of stuck after that. Hopefully I'll get the next chapter up more quickly!_

"Well, I can tell you _what_ happened," Vincent said, staring at the laptop screen with furrowed brows. A cable ran from the side of the computer to a wall-mounted panel near one of the food dispensers. "But I still haven't the foggiest idea _why_ it happened." He tapped the touch-pad a couple of times, then turned the screen toward Fargo. "The contamination protocols were triggered, apparently on every machine in the cafeteria simultaneously."

He shifted his chair over slightly, so that he could continue to work at the computer with Fargo peering over his shoulder. "All of the automated cuisine dispensers have sensors designed to pick up traces of salmonella, _e. coli_, and a wide variety of more exotic biological and chemical contaminants. If the sensors detect a problem, they trigger a lock-down response in the unit, preventing the tainted food from being distributed before someone can come and find out what the problem is." He clicked through the program on the screen, shaking his head in puzzlement. "The really strange thing is, I can't figure out what triggered the lock-down. The logs don't show anything unusual recorded by the sensors – so unless they're malfunctioning in a way that I haven't found, they didn't trip the lock-down command."

Jo was pacing back and forth between a pair of cafeteria tables a few feet away from the two men, watching the small crowd of GD employees at the other end of the room. When Vincent had arrived a little more than half an hour ago, he'd come armed with a coffee urn, a tray of sandwiches, and a few boxes of fresh pastries. The food had smoothed more than a few ruffled feathers, and by now the swarm of hungry scientists was much reduced. "So what _did_ send the command, then?" she asked.

"And, more importantly, how do we fix it?" Fargo put in. "If we don't get this straightened out pretty soon, I'm gonna have to start letting people go home to eat, which is going to lose us a lot of working hours. We've got deadlines to meet, and not just for the Astraeus mission."

Vincent seemed unfazed by Fargo's anxious fluttering. "You can send people over to Cafe Diem, in shifts. I can whip up some short-order specials that will have everyone ready to get back to work in no time. But this..." He shook his head at the screen. "Until we know what triggered the contamination response, I can't guarantee it won't happen again. And I won't just shut down the lock-down mechanism, since that would put us at risk if a real contaminant is introduced."

Fargo nodded. "I'll get some of our techs working on it right away. Is there any chance this could've been intentional?" He glanced suspiciously around the room, half-expecting to see Parrish lurking under a table, with that smug-bastard grin on his face.

"Seems like kind of an indirect line of attack, but it's possible," Jo responded, turning to face him. "If this were deliberate sabotage, the goal would have to be either to get us to disrupt our usual routine surrounding meals, or to lure us into shutting down the safety mechanism in order to slip something through the safeguards and into the food." Fargo started to say something, but she cut him off with a gesture. "That's not likely, since it involves too much uncertainty on the saboteur's part, with needing to predict whether we'll shut down the safety measures and keep using the machines – which we're not doing. So if it was active sabotage, it's probably intended to disrupt our usual patterns, and get people out of their labs for longer than it would take them to come and eat lunch here. If Vincent can get all the eggheads their lunches in a hurry, and I stay behind and do a security sweep of all Sections, that should take care of any potential breaches." Jo suspected she knew what Fargo was thinking: that some of the Astraeus alternates might have decided to remove some of the competition and get themselves bumped up the list. She was tempted to tell him that he was being paranoid – but the specter of Beverly Barlowe loomed in her mind, and she wasn't about to argue with any added precautions he wanted. _Any excuse to focus on work instead of worrying about whatever Zane wants to say to me_, an inner voice put in, but Jo ignored it.

"You should assign a team to stay here with you and help with the sweep," Fargo suggested.

She shook her head. "No need, with the CHARMS interface. I'm getting input from sensors all over the building. If there's a breach, I'll call for backup." _Besides, I could do with some alone time right now._

Looking unconvinced, Fargo pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. "If you're sure; I trust your judgment. I'll go make the announcement and start sending groups over to Cafe Diem."

"Give me twenty minutes or so, if you can hold off the ravening hordes for that long," Jo put in. "There's a truck coming to pick up some chemicals from Dr. Merton in Section Four, and I'd rather not have two potential security holes at once."

Vincent looked up from the computer. "That'll give me time to head back to my kitchen and get rolling on those sandwiches. I'm almost finished downloading the logs from the contaminant sensors; I just need a couple of minutes more."

"All right. Let me know if anything turns up in those logs. And thanks, Vincent." Fargo nodded and started toward the cafeteria door, with Jo beside him.

"When you send people out, start with Section Five," she suggested. "That way we can get the most sensitive projects back under supervision the fastest, since they're the likeliest target if someone does try to breach our security."

"And if someone does decide to skip out for an unscheduled snack, it won't be one of the classified projects that gets left unattended," Fargo added, and from the expression on his face, Jo suspected that he had a couple of likely offenders in mind. He hesitated a moment, then stopped in the corridor and turned to face her. "I don't want to harp on it, and I know you're capable, but there's no reason you need to handle security on this alone."

Jo brought up a hand to forestall his concerns. "I'm not putting anything at risk, Fargo. If I'm the only one down there, that means if I hear a noise, I know something's wrong. I'll be able to concentrate better on the input from the CHARMS interface if I don't have to coordinate a security team, and backup will only be a floor away."

Fargo didn't look pleased, but Jo could tell that he wasn't about to overrule her without a solid reason, and she was thankful for it. "All right. Head down to Section Four and deal with Merton, and I'll start sending people out as soon as I hear from you."

"Will do." _Thanks, Fargo,_ she added silently. They parted ways at the next junction, Fargo heading for his office while Jo waited for the elevator.


End file.
